Men's Rights Activists respond to the Elliot Rodger murders with a hearty "Nothing to see here! Move along!"

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If anyone was hoping – against their better judgement – that Men’s Rights activists would be inspired by the tragedy in Isla Vista to reconsider any of their beliefs, or even to reflect for a moment on the many striking similarities between passages in Elliot Rodger’s book-length manifesto and comments posted every day by MRAs and others in the manosphere, well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you should not keep that hope alive.

It’s not that they’re not talking about the tragedy. A look through the top 100 posts in the Men’s Rights subreddit, the largest Men’s Rights forum online, reveals that roughly a third of them, including the top stickied post, relate in some way to Elliot Rodger’s rampage and the discussions that have come up online and in the media in its aftermath.

But the message of virtually all of these posts is: “Nothing to see here! Move along!” There are numerous posts expressing outrage that anyone would see any connection between Rodger’s toxic misogyny to the Men’s Rights movement; there are others mocking and attacking the #YesAllWomen hashtag; there’s even one suggesting that Rodger, who wrote about how he longed to watch all the women of the world starve to death in concentration camps, wasn’t actually a misogynist at all.

Sorry to break it to you, fella, but that’s not how defamation suits work. If it were, all of us who call ourselves feminists would be collecting millions of dollars from the Men’s Rights subreddit for all the patently untrue things you guys say about us every day of every week.

Still others make sure that everyone knows that Rodger hated men too – not that this has actually gone unnoticed in the media or in discussions of the tragedy.

And then there’s this fellow, who seems to think that Rodger only hated men, and that his big problem with women was that he loved them too much:

There are, it’s true, two posts that raise the issue of what might be done to prevent tragedies like this from happening in the future. One of them takes on the issue of “virgin shaming.” (Sure, I’m against that, and against slut shaming too. Odd that roughly 100% of the virgin shaming I’ve ever heard in my life has come from MRAs and other non-fans of this blog, even though — sorry to break it to you fellows — I’ve not been a virgin since the early Reagan administration.)

Meanwhile, the other “positive” suggestion — the stickied top post, submitted by one of the forum’s moderators — is pretty transparently intended as a PR move – and an excuse to bash feminists.

Yep, “creep shaming.” That’s the problem! Way to cut through all the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter! The problem isn’t that some men — well, a lot of men — think and act in predatory and entitled ways towards women. The problem is that sometimes when they do, women call them “creeps.”

The problem isn’t that the world’s creepiest and most entitled man just killed 6 innocent people, the problem is “creep shaming.”

After killing his roommates and a friend of theirs, Rodger attempted to get inside a sorority so he could massacre the women inside it. But he couldn’t get anyone to let him in. Probably because, well, whoever was nearest the door thought he looked a bit, well, creepy.

“Creep-shaming” isn’t some insidious form of discrimination against awkward men. It’s a defense mechanism that women develop to protect them against predatory men. And in the case of the Isla Vista murders, I’m guessing that the willingness of women to go with their gut sense that Rodger was a creep literally saved lives.

But the mods of the Men’s Rights subreddit would rather moan about “creep shaming.” They would prefer that women lower their defenses against men like Elliot Rodger — because it hurts their feelings to sometimes get called a “creep.”

Guys, this is why people think Elliot Rodger was an MRA.

EDIT: I added more to the conclusion because I had more to say about creep shaming.

Let’s try it! Slavery is bad because people should never be treated like property. Go on, Sheety, limbo your way right under that bar and do the whole turning an ethical abstraction upside down thing. You’ve already demonstrated just how ethically, um, let’s be nice and call it “flexible” you can be.

BLS: Of course I do. Consent is a condition for entitlement when talking about sex. Sparky just doesn’t get it because I am clearly putting consent as a precondition to being entitled to sex.

Nope. Consent is conditional, not absolute. It can be revoked. That means there is never an entitlement to sex. This most recentlu made something of a splash in some circles (esp. feminist) when some people said marriage created an entitlement to sex, i.e. it’s impossible for a husband to rape their own wife.

But what about rights? Because sex is part of human nature and humans have a right to their human nature.

What a load of bollocks. Violence is a part of human nature too. Doesn’t mean I have a right to beat someone senseless if they piss me off.

That’s what I mean when I say I would rather live in the real world instead of the world of abstractions.

Says the person who abstracts that “human nature = rights”.

Instead of feeding the phony psychiatric industry lie machine with the smug and smarmy criticisms of Rodger’s misogyny and mental health problems, why not highlight Rodger as an example of how patriarchy harms men as much as women sometimes

Because he’s not a very good example of it, and the pretenses that he is are based on tendentious rhetorical flourishes which equate the deaths of the men in the crimes of Rodger, and the declared intent he had to kill as many women as possible.

Angry scathing invective at what is obvious and self apparent, that is his rampant misogyny. There, I finished the sentence you left unfinished.

Do you realize how many times I’ve been through this with people like you.

I’d like to think every time you try to make this case. I’d guess a few times less than that, on the assumption that you don’t always hang out with people who have a decent moral compass.

Argenti,
Of course I do. Consent is a condition for entitlement when talking about sex. Sparky just doesn’t get it because I am clearly putting consent as a precondition to being entitled to sex.

Except it is not. Entitlement still implies being in a position upon which you will or must get something, that is, “it comes with the title”. In your example, what happens if after setting up a date with the lovely harpy three oceans over, I think better of mating with a half-bird half woman who would use my eyes to decorate her nest? Does my withdrawal of consent in any way still entitle her to my eyeballs in her rustic interior design schemes?
Entitltement isn’t the word you’re looking for.

But what about rights? Because sex is part of human nature and humans have a right to their human nature. But that could change. Not only our rights but our human nature. Science is scary.

Which means you start of with Wrong and are led into further Wrong. I get what you’re trying to do here, taking the principle (“Consent”) and making it into a suddenly bad thing by way of careful analysis and interpretation, but it’s not how it works and you have to be a lot sharper if you want to make the point you’re trying to make. Because rights aren’t about human nature, they’re about specifically stated things like shelter or protetion or speech. “Human nature” is so vast and vague a concept that we don’t use it as basis for legal codes.

Maybe I was too harsh calling you guys fake feminists, but you guys definitely are rhetoric heavy. That’s what I mean when I say I would rather live in the real world instead of the world of abstractions.

That’s great, because you don’t seem to be too good with abstractions.

Most premises based on abstractions, especially ethical ones, can easily be turned upside down and result in an equally valid assertion.

No they don’t. You have a measuring stick for “equally valid”, so unless you’re postulating that the desire to live is not an inherently logical statement by an individual being because evolution creates a false universe where that is no more than the selfish desire of flesh and meat, then the notion that say: “People should not be harmed” is much more valid than “People should be harmed”, because we have validity measuring tests like: “Are we harming people with our princinples?”

So my belief is that a lot of rhetorical feminism simply results in retributive finger pointing in an opportunistic way that actually ends up serving patriarchy.

That’s an interesting belief – but it only stems from the fact that you think that ethically charged statements can be flipped and remain equally valid.

“Some men objectify women and turn them into sex objects” is not the same thing as “Some women objectify men and turn them into success objects” – no matter how many times Warren Farrell might write it in a book or MRA’s might argue it out. See if you can guess why.

Think about MRA’s. Do men not deserve rights? Of course they do, everyone does, but what really matters is not the words men and rights but what those words end up encouraging in the real world.

I completely agree

And my belief is that a lot of rhetorical feminism is guilty of this too, just from the other side of things.

but this makes no sense, unless you’re actually and truly stating that rhetorical feminism is the same as rethorical masculinism, when that feminism claims “Some men rape women, and this is bad, because women are people” and that masculism claims “Some women deserve to be raped, because they’re sluts, and also evil”.

The fundamental problem with Rodger and similar cases is this imo:
Pull up any porn website and you see millions upon millions of young women, often very attractive, doing horrible things for chump change much of the time. Some have even been bullied and shamed to suicide. Rodger was a nice middle (upper-middle) class kid that wasn’t noticeably messed up or unattractive.

But if women are treated like property, then the laws of capitalism apply to their bodies, not the law of consent and human rights. And in that case, that control is in someone else’s hand, just like when they say there are more empty houses and apartments than homeless people.

… what? I mean yes, but what? The sentences don’t relate to each other, but each is individiually true. Being self contained renders the entire thing kind of odd. Many young women are in porn! Rodgers was so nice that the police didn’t think of him as a particularly strange person! If women are property then supply and demand are used to regulate their bodies instead of empathy! If so, that means the laws of supply and demand will do the same as it does for the housing market, where sometimes there are more empty houses than there are homeless to fill them if they were given for free

therefore it is my opinion that we shall burn the Eiffel Tower to the ground and reinstate the flint rock as prime barter currency

What I’m obviously referring to is ideology, that is, the way that an obvious truth is consistently denied and swept under the rug, even violently sometimes. And with all the insults and response from this blog, how can any of you claim to be any better than the MRA’s, PUA’s, etc? I don’t think you are (except maybe that other one that was real shitty with the guy that said Rodger didn’t kill enough women).

Glad you think killing women is bad. Odd how you can’t go from there to thinking how claiming that feminists are out to castrate all men and turn them into beta supporters for bastard children is the same as the claim that women and men should have equal rights.

What is this, Moshe Feldenkrais’ The Elusive Obvious?

Instead of feeding the phony psychiatric industry lie machine with the smug and smarmy criticisms of Rodger’s misogyny and mental health problems, why not highlight Rodger as an example of how patriarchy harms men as much as women sometimes. And in this patriarchy, different sorts of mental health issues develop with an industry not willing to honestly deal with them since they too are invested in patriarchy and misogyny. Well, that would make too much sense, wouldn’t it.

Because it’s not the case? The man machine gunned people to death. Using that as some trite political gain is a bit weird. It’s bad for everyone when people go out and shoot other people. That’s rather obvious. And by the way an ethical abstraction I doubt you can turn on your head to produce an equally valid statement.

I mean, I agree, but again, your sentences don’t really relate to each other, or to anything in particular. We criticize Rodger’s misogyny because it’s a prime cause of what happened, and obivously notions of patriarchy, entitlement and the ideas of women and men he had in his head play into that – but I think you’ll rather find that people here were all quite keen on not going on about his mental health “problems”, because they’re pretty irrelevant really. And how does that relate to the psychiatric industry? Or capitalism regulating women’s bodies and homeless people and the buildings?

And I’m not excusing what he did. But that sort of response is typical of how patriarchy socializes young men, isn’t it. And so was the response on this website. Angry scathing invective at what is obvious and self apparent.

But it isn’t always so I think it deserves to be mentioned.

Angry scatching invective at what is obvious and self apparent is odd, given that if things were so obvious and self apparent, you wouldn’t be able to find endless examples of it not being obvious or self apparent. Read through the archives for any number of “But it wasn’t really about patriarchy or misogyny, it was…”.
You’re an odd duck.

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